On July 1st, the great advance began. At six in the evening of July 4th, the Legion was ordered to clear the enemy out of the village of Belloy-en-Santerre. Alan Seeger advanced in the first rush, and his squad was enfiladed by the fire of six German machine guns, concealed in a hollow way. Most of them went down, and Alan among them — wounded in several places. But the following waves of attack were more fortunate. As his comrades came up to him, Alan cheered them on; and as they left him behind, they heard him singing a marching-song in English: —
Accents of ours were in the fierce melee.
They took the village, they drove the invaders out; but for some reason unknown—perhaps a very good one — the battlefield was left unvisited that night. Next morning, Alan Seeger lay dead.
There is little to add. He wrote his own best epitaph in the "Ode": —
And on those furthest rims of hallowed ground
Where the forlorn, the gallant charge expires,
When the slain bugler has long ceased to sound,
And on the tangled wires
The last wild rally staggers, crumbles, stops,
Withered beneath the shrapnel's iron showers: —
Now heaven be thanked, we gave a few brave drops,
Now heaven be thanked, a few brave drops were ours.
His death was briefly noticed in one or two French papers. The 'Matin' published a translation of part of the poem, "Champagne, 1914-15", and remarked that "Cyrano de Bergerac would have signed it." But France had no time, even if she had had the knowledge, to realize the greatness of the sacrifice that had been made for her. That will come later. One day France will know that this unassuming soldier of the Legion,
Who, not unmindful of the antique debt,
Came back the generous path of Lafayette,
was one whom even she may be proud to have reckoned among her defenders.
The "Last Poems" speak for themselves. They contain lines which he would doubtless have remodelled had he lived to review them in tranquillity — perhaps one or two pieces, sprung from a momentary mood, which, on reflection he would have rejected.* But they not only show a great advance on his earlier work: they rank high, or I am much mistaken, among the hitherto not very numerous poems in the English language produced, not in mere memory or imagination of war, but in its actual stress and under its haunting menace.
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